- Those go to restaurants, yeah, the big box.
Sometimes grocery stores will go and buy bulk
to go and put in a bulk bin,
but a lot of the time, the restaurants get that.
They don't need the packs necessarily.
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- The way that I see these mushrooms
is that they're super plump,
and that's what I really like about them.
They're not too discolored, and the fact that they're all
in pretty much the same shape and color
is a really good sign
that these are gonna be good for today.
These are gonna be some trumpet mushrooms.
These are super meaty.
They have a lot of hyphae
that's like really entangled.
So that really makes it more chewy and more toothsome.
- The mushrooms that we grow at tend
to kind of be like a pom-pom shape,
which a lot of our customers appreciate.
- Yo, I love these.
These kinda look like something from like Willy Wonka.
If you actually had a trip, you can see these mushrooms,
and they kinda look like they're from another world.
If you're a person who's not really fond of a mushroom,
treat the mushroom as if you're treating a piece of beef.
Give it a little thought and care to it,
and you're going to be surprised
about what gonna get out of it.
So the dish that we're gonna be making is,
it's called Nam Cuon.
This garlic oil, and I wanna make sure
that all of it's covered
because the thing about mushrooms is that
they don't have a lot of moisture content,
and they're really dry.
So we want to hydrate them and kinda lubricate them.
We smoked the king trumpet mushrooms and the maitakes.
They get their super nice kind of hue to it
as if you were getting a smoke ring
but on the outside of it,
I'm gonna start basting it
with this fermented bean curd sauce.
And what you're gonna get a lot of cheesy notes and you
don't think Asian food and cheesy notes,
but with the development of the fermentation process,
you're gonna get a lotta funk that's gonna come out of it.
Mushrooms should not be underplayed.
The quality of a mushroom can kind of like surprise you.
So this is gonna be a fried sweet potato fritter.
We're gonna go and use the mushrooms that we grilled
to kinda top it off.
Vietnamese food is all about sharing.
We present it with a bunch of herbs and lettuce,
so that way, they can wrap it up.
All these components play a different part.
Pretty much the highlight of this dish,
along with these mushrooms, is gonna be the herbs.
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- Mushrooms are magical.
They have so much mystery.
I always think about how humans try to explain so much,
and the more we learn about mushrooms,
the more we realize that we don't even have the language
to explain it.
Even us trying to talk about mycelium digesting substrate
or even a fruiting body coming out of a block,
it's us trying to use our own language and experience
to explain something that is completely beyond us.
I'm Andrew Carter, and we're
in Smallhold's Brooklyn macro farm.
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How mushrooms grow, originally, this was sawdust.
All the raw material is then hydrated and sterilized,
and then seeded essentially with the mycelium.
It's inoculation technically,
but seeding is probably the easier way to think about it.
So what you're looking at here is a bag
of fully colonized mycelium, ready to fruit.
Originally, this was pure sawdust,
and so we call the sawdust substrate,
which is food for the mycelium.
Mycelium is the living organism,
and so the best parallel is an apple tree.
The mycelium would be the tree,
and the mushroom that you eat would be the apple
that falls off of the tree.
The living organism is this thing that it's hard for humans
to really comprehend and really understand.
It's this net of an organism here
that makes its way through whatever substrate you have,
either in a bag or a bottle or however you're growing it.
A world without mycelium wouldn't be a world.
It wouldn't exist.
It's highly likely we wouldn't have anything
we have right now.
But what we're doing here
is imitating exactly where these grow.
A lot of the mushrooms that we grow,
grow in kind of near the surface of a forest.
And a lot of the time, that's actually a fairly humid
and cool environment.
We have certain temperatures that we fluctuate
throughout the day and throughout the week,
and we have certain humidity set points
that we're managing throughout the day and the week
for each of these varieties
to make sure that they have the best experience possible.
The lighting is very strategic.
It's technical.
Fungi is its own kingdom,
so they don't do photosynthesis to create energy,
but they do need light to grow.
The mushrooms that we grow tend to like about 410
to 450 nanometers,
which is essentially blue into a little bit of UV.
But what's happening is that the mycelium itself is ready
to fruit, and then it needs a trigger to tell it to fruit
and to set those pins
that eventually will become the fruiting body.
The light does that.
This is a lion's mane growing out.
This is actually gonna be a fully fruit body formation,
probably over the next two to three days.
It'll triple in size throughout that process.
These are blue oysters.
These are ready to harvest.
We have some pink oysters here.
Normally the pink oysters would actually be
in a little different environment.
They're tropical, and so they actually can be part
of a little warmer of an area.
Normally you'd never find a tree just fruiting
that much pink oysters, which is again,
kind of the power of doing it in controlled environments
and the control spaces like this.
And then we have some yellow oysters here,
which are also about ready to go.
So each of these are completely different varieties.
And so even a blue oyster and a pink oyster
and yellow oyster and a king oyster or a royal trumpet,
they're very different varieties.
They're all pleurotus, but they come from different regions,
and they grow completely differently.
So we have different holes for a different varieties.
So as you can see, this, we have certain holes
in certain sides.
What we're really trying to do is allow the mushroom
to focus its energy on creating the fruiting bodies
in certain spaces.
And so technically you could grow one.
You could put one hole here,
and then you could have a larger fruiting body,
or you can put a bunch of holes here,
and you can have a bunch of smaller fruiting bodies.
We found that doing it on one side tends
to be the best experience for the lion's mane, for example.
My whole career has been growing plants.
That's what I spent actually more time doing
than growing mushrooms.
I originally thought there would be a lot of similarities
between the plants and the mushrooms,
but it turns out the more we learn about them,
they're drastically different.
We're about to pick a bunch of mushrooms.
Today it's gonna be some royal trumpets, some blue oysters,
and some lion's mane.
These are blue oysters.
To harvest these is pretty easy.
You just kind of pick it off.
(light music)
You can see a nice a blue color in here,
and a lotta that has to do with the temperature
that it's in.
There are all sorts of ways that you can grow these,
but when it's exposed to an nice, cool temperature
like you have in here,
you'll see that you get a nice blue color.
They grow in these clusters, which are really nice,
but these tend to be kind of the perfect one
for our customers.
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The customers really like whole clusters
when you're doing it in bulk.
We have some restaurant customers
that'll serve a whole cluster and roast it,
put some like egg yolk in it,
or have a nice, little a menu item with that.
But then when we're packing it in the packs,
we usually kind of break it up a little bit
because we're pretty specific in how much it needs to be
in each of those packs.
This is the fruiting body of the fungus that we're growing.
This is where the mushroom kinda popped out
of the substrate too.
You can see the younger sort of fruiting bodies
that came out of this cluster,
but it's a very dense, dense mushroom.
These are good and healthy clusters.
- I'm about to harvest some kings,
and then we're gonna pack those up into some clam shells
and some five-pound boxes too.
Kinda looking for an umbrella style cap.
Kings can get really big
when they're healthy and they're happy,
they can get as big as this.
This is probably around as big as they get.
The color in the caps is really nice too.
It's a nice dark brown,
and these are still kind of a down kind of like an umbrella.
So this is probably peak time to be harvesting these.
You can tell kinda the age of a mushroom.
The term for a baby mushroom is a pin.
See, this is right when we harvest it, as big as it gets.
And then these little guys in here,
these are baby pins, and the pins will turn
into these giant kings over the span of seven to nine days.
So it's really quick.
So you see it growing kind of in front of you,
which is really unique in urban agriculture or agriculture,
that you could see it happen so quickly.
(upbeat music)
So usually we can get up to a two
to three pounds off of a block.
From eyesight here, this is probably 12 pounds
just finished harvesting off of like three or four blocks.
(upbeat music)
- What we're doing is we're packing them in our eco pack.
This is compostable and recyclable,
no plastic, no styrofoam.
We bring these to our stores.
What we really wanna do is create a package
that really inspires people in the grocery store.
It's not necessarily colors related to the mushrooms,
but generally the mushroom section is pretty boring.
And so we think that by bringing some nice color in
and by bringing nice packaging
and obviously a really fresh mushroom,
especially some of the special mushrooms,
we can really excite people in the grocery store.
That's kinda the idea there.
So these, you can just pick off,
and you see they're kinda brain-like.
They're structurally very different
than the other mushrooms,
but people make like pulled pork out of these, crab cakes.
(upbeat music)
We're packing a pack with some lion's mane
and some royal trumpets.
This is a Fancy Pack from Smallhold.
We call it the Fancy Pack because it's a bunch of mushrooms
that some people think are fancy.
We believe that in time, these will be the mushrooms
that everyone eats.
We've done our job if they become not fancy anymore.
We try all sorts of different mixes for people,
seeing what people like to cook together.
And we want this to be the center of the plate.
A lot of people will sell a three ounce pack
or a smaller pack because they're putting mushrooms
kind of on the side, but what we believe is that
by giving people more mushrooms,
people will eat more mushrooms,
and they'll start to replace that steak or that hamburger
with a bunch of different types of mushrooms, essentially.
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- These are going out to Union Market.
They're getting these two variety packs,
and it's gonna go straight from the farm to their shelves.
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- There's so many reasons why I love mushrooms.
At its base level, they grow off of waste streams.
It's not very common to find a product
that's as ecologically sustainable
that also can feed so many people.
Mushrooms, I think, are going to feed the world.
They already are, but it's only gonna be up from here.
- Hey, Carlos. How's it going, man?
Good, good, good to see you.
- Good to see you.
- Got some mushrooms for you.
Where you want me to drop these guys off?
- Right here. I got this.
- Oh, perfect, awesome.
- There are so many mushrooms, like all the mushrooms
that we grow, that are truly underrepresented,
not only in restaurants, but also in the grocery stores
and just sort of the masses and their flavors
and how people buy mushrooms.
Because of that, we can bring pink oysters
or we can bring royal trumpets to the consumer,
and we can completely blow their minds.
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